Pharmaceutical Reason: Knowledge and Value in Global Psychiatry

by Andrew Lakoff

Book Overview

Andrew Lakoff argues that a new 'pharmaceutical' way of thinking about and acting upon mental disorder is coming to reshape not only the field of psychiatry, but also our very notions of self. Drawing from a comprehensive ethnography of psychiatric practice in Argentina (a country which boasts the most psychoanalysts per capita in the world) Lakoff looks at new ways of understanding and intervening in human behaviour. He charts the globalization of...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0521546664
• ISBN13: 9780521546669
• Release Date: January 2006
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Length: 220 Pages
• Weight: 1.55 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 6.1" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

A great book

This is a great book. It shows the effects of the categories we use in a specific context and provides insight of why in some places doctors use a language that is not transfarable to other contexts in their rigid form. As the author shows, categories are inmersed in social, political and epistemological mileu. For those who love Foucault, Harre, Hacking Parker or Rose, this is a very complementary reading.